A limited constitutional government calls for a rules-based, freemarket monetary system, not the topsy-turvy fiat dollar that now exists under central banking. This issue of the Cato Journal examines the case for alternatives to central banking and the reforms needed to move toward free-market money.

The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

Americans are finally enjoying an improving economy after years of recession and slow growth. The unemployment rate is dropping, the economy is expanding, and public confidence is rising. Surely our economic crisis is behind us. Or is it? In Going for Broke: Deficits, Debt, and the Entitlement Crisis, Cato scholar Michael D. Tanner examines the growing national debt and its dire implications for our future and explains why a looming financial meltdown may be far worse than anyone expects.

The Cato Institute has released its 2014 Annual Report, which documents a dynamic year of growth and productivity. “Libertarianism is not just a framework for utopia,” Cato’s David Boaz writes in his book, The Libertarian Mind. “It is the indispensable framework for the future.” And as the new report demonstrates, the Cato Institute, thanks largely to the generosity of our Sponsors, is leading the charge to apply this framework across the policy spectrum.

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Topic: Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Each year, the homeland security appropriations bill provides for funding that supports REAL ID, the national ID law that Congress passed in haste in 2005.

States across the country originally refused to implement the national ID law, but as we showed in the recently released report, “REAL ID: A State-by-State Update,” some states are reversing course and beginning to implement, and in other states bureaucrats are moving forward with REAL ID contrary to state policy.

Part of the reason this continues is because the federal government continues to funnel money into REAL ID compliance. Year over year, federal grant money keeps state bureaucrats and state bureaucrat interest groups like the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators sniffing around for grant dollars and contracts.

Interestingly, four members of the Senate appropriations subcommittee that funds REAL ID through the Department of Homeland Security are from states that have rejected REAL ID. Senators Patty Murray (D-WA), Jon Tester (D-MT), Mark Begich (D-AK), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) could move to cut off funding for REAL ID if they chose, but, to my knowledge, have not done so in the past.

Senators Tester and Begich are cosponsors of a bill by Senator John Walsh (D-MT) to repeal REAL ID, and Senator Tester came to Cato in 2008 to call out REAL ID’s demerits (his presentation starts at 21:00 in the mp3).

If the senators from anti-REAL-ID states could tap one more member of the homeland security appropriations subcommittee, they would have a majority to amend the bill to withdraw funds from the national ID project. Will they stand by and let REAL ID funding go through again this year?

The REAL ID Act is a federal law that calls on states to knit their driver licensing systems together into a national ID. Congress passed it nine years ago yesterday, setting a three-year deadline for state compliance.

You might think that a program would be dead if it failed to materialize after more than triple the time Congress gave for its implementation. But REAL ID is walking dead.

After the law passed, half the states in the country passed resolutions objecting to REAL ID or laws barring their states from complying. And the Department of Homeland Security has pushed back the deadline again and again and again. But the federal government keeps funding REAL ID, and state bureaucrats keep plodding forward with the national ID system.

In a Policy Analysis released today, we examined the progress of REAL ID in states around the country. REAL ID: A State-by-State Update reveals that some states’ legislatures have backtracked on their opposition to the national ID law. Some motor vehicle bureaucrats have quietly moved forward with REAL ID compliance contrary to state policy. And in some states, motor vehicle bureaucrats have worked to undercut state policy opposing REAL ID and the national ID system.

Funds for implementing REAL ID come from DHS annual budget, which is appropriated by the House and Senate Appropriations Committees’ homeland security subcommittees. Congress has put around $50 million a year toward REAL ID in recent years, part of $300 to $500 million a year it spends on identification and tracking programs.

The alternative is better: Congress could save money and protect liberty if it fully defunded REAL ID. State political leaders should check to see if the administrators who work under them are building a national ID contrary to state policy, or if bureaucrats are lobbying to put the legislature behind the national ID program.

It hasn’t been implemented, but because it hasn’t been repealed or defunded, REAL ID awaits the day when the political winds blow in favor of a national ID.

In a 2009 blog post about an $18,000,000 U.S. government web site, I pointed to the web site, Recovery.org, which was then hosting the same information as the government site, and doing it for free. Since then, the Recovery.org domain has evidently been transferred to an organization specializing in recovery from addiction (to alcohol and drugs, not government spending).

The email I received today purports to be from an attorney named “Rick Smith” of the “Law Offices of Rick Smith & Associates”—no web site or phone number, and only a Gmail account. It asks me to remove the link to http://www.recovery.org/, claiming to have “received numerous complaints” from readers of the 2009 blog post.

It goes on: “If you fail to respond by May 13 we will be forced to serve you with a formal DMCA take down notice. A copy can also be sent to the hosting provider and major search engines that can exclude this and other pages from organic search rankings.”

The notice-and-take-down provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows aggrieved copyright holders to attack the wrongful Internet posting of material over which the law gives them control. It is not there to help people seeking correction of web site inaccuracies, much less for them to threaten suppression of access to material in which they do not hold the copyright.

I know this, of course, but many people don’t. Emails like this can fool people into thinking that they have to make demanded changes.

I’m going to make the change because there’s no sense in preserving a bad link. I’m also going to contact the folks at Recovery.org to see if they’re aware that someone purporting to be their attorney is misusing copyright in their name.

The New York Times reported at the top of page one yesterday on the $4.1 million in payments that a single physical therapist in Brooklyn got from Medicare in 2012. It’s a shocking sum, and Medicare fraud is common in both physical therapy and the Brooklyn area. The therapist who received the money says that the billings are for his large, multi-office practice.

The point is broader: Reporters, medical trade association figures, investigators and researchers are poring over newly released data about Medicare spending. They’re strengthening public oversight and the public’s capacity to question this government program. It’s data that the American Medical Association and other industry groups fought against releasing. There is risk that the numbers will lead some to unfair conclusions, perhaps even in the case of this Brooklyn physical therapist, but the public oversight it brings to the Medicare program and the circumspection it brings to fraudsters and others will be more than worth it. Data is a powerful oversight tool.

That’s why I think it’s good news that the House of Representatives passed the DATA Act yesterday. The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act, introduced by Mark Warner (D-VA) in the Senate and Darrell Issa (R-CA) in the House, requires the federal government to adopt data standards for all federal spending and publish all of it online. This will permit the public to gather insights like the ones in that New York Times story across the vastness of the federal spending enterprise. It will make the diffuse cost of government a little more acute in the minds of many, positioning Americans to say specifically which spending should stop.

Change will not come instantly, and the legislation is not self-executing, but groups like the Data Transparency Coalition, a prime mover behind the legislation, appear poised to insist on full execution of the law. Implementation should not have the cost that the Congressional Budget Office estimated for it, and if it does, the billions saved thanks to availability of information to the public should justify the costs. If another “cost” of transparency is improvement of federal programs that should be eliminated, I think that beats the today’s status quo of having them on the books and failing.

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman made some interesting rhetorical choices in a New York Times op-ed yesterday taking after share economy leaders AirBnB and Uber. The challenge they present to outdated regulation leads him to call these businesses “cyberlibertarians” and “cybercowboys.” The latter awkward metaphor inhabits the title of the piece: “Taming the Digital Wild West.”

It’s an awkward metaphor because “Wild West” was an epithet leveled at the Internet itself in its early days. Thank heavens the forces of stasis didn’t prevent us from inhabiting this place—and here’s hoping they won’t prevent us from finding new terrain. How safe and impoverished we would be, both materially and spiritually, if we didn’t have the rollicking, wide-open Internet.

But the most interesting rhetorical choice is his effort to push community-enhancing job-creation into the “libertarian” corner of Times’ readers’ vistas. His hope, it appears, is that readers’ revulsion around the word “libertarian” (if not liberty itself) will overcome what they know about car- and room-sharing. People all over New York and the world are operating small businesses, and these small businesses bring them in close personal contact with others. They build wealth, and they build community.

Calling that “cyberlibertarian” may just cause some reflexive progressives and conservatives to take a fresh look at liberty. While we’re working toward miracles, maybe people will drop the “cyber” prefix, too!

(Disclosure: I’ve used both AirBnB and Uber with generally wonderful results.)

Remember broadcast television? Amid the avalanche of new streaming services, DVRs, and Rokus, not to mention cable TV, some people may have forgotten—or, if they’re under 25, never known—that there are TV shows in the air that can be captured with an antenna. The Supreme Court certainly hasn’t forgotten, given that it maintains an outdated rule that broadcast TV gets less First Amendment protection than cable, video-on-demand, or almost anything else–a rule dating to the 1969 case of Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC.

That lower standard of protection comes from the belief that the broadcast-frequency spectrum is scarce, and thus that the Federal Communications Commission is properly charged with licensing the spectrum for the public “interest, convenience, and necessity.” But if newspapers or magazines were similarly licensed, the First Amendment violation would be obvious to all but the most hardened censor.

Hence the case of Minority Television Project v. FCC. Minority Television Project is an independent, noncommercial license-holding TV station in San Francisco. Unlike most noncommercial license holders, Minority TV receives no PBS money. Because it’s an over-the-air broadcaster, however, it must comply with the restrictions placed on the licenses by Congress and the FCC, including prohibitions on paid commercials and political ads. Minority TV challenged these restrictions as violating the First Amendment.

Applying Red Lion’s lower First Amendment standard, the district court, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and even the en banc Ninth Circuit (11 judges rather than the usual 3) all ruled against Minority TV. On petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court, Minority TV argues that Red Lion’s rationale for reducing broadcasters’ rights is outdated and should be overruled.

Cato has filed an amicus brief in support of Minority TV, agreeing that it’s time to give broadcast TV full First Amendment protection. Just as we argued in 2011’s FCC v. Fox Television Stations—where the Court chose to evade the question—it’s time to update our law to fit current realities. The way that people consume information and entertainment has changed dramatically since 1969. Rather than three broadcast networks, we have hundreds of channels of various kinds, and increasingly people are forgoing traditional TV altogether. The FCC can still license broadcasters—that system isn’t going away anytime soon regardless of the next mind-boggling innovation—but the conditions it places on those licenses have to satisfy strict First Amendment scrutiny, especially when they pertain to political speech.

The Supreme Court should take this case in order to update its treatment of broadcasters’ speech rights, including a requirement that the government offer a truly compelling justification any time it wants to restrict them.

This week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration announced four upcoming hearings on issues raised in the Department of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force’s July 2013 paper, “Copyright Policy, Creativity, and Innovation in the Digital Economy.” The hearings will be held in or near Nashville, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco in May, June, and July.

In the book, Bell treats copyright as a statutory privilege that threatens not just constitutional rights, but natural rights, too. He argues for a new libertarian view of copyright that reconciles the desire to create incentives for creators with our inalienable liberties. Bell’s vision is of a world less encumbered by legal restrictions and yet richer in art, music, and other expressive works.

Register now for what is sure to be a lively discussion of this perennially interesting issue on May 7th!